Anyone visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today will be more than confused and perplexed. Instead of walking into a church in the usual sense of the word one enters through tall wooden doors into a dark vaulted rotunda with candles burning everywhere and incense pervading the atmosphere. It is crowded with tourists, monks, priests, and others attired in religious garb, who are conducting tours and holding services. Space is so limited that the individual chapels are jammed next to one another and hardly adequate for any kind of service. Presently space has been allotted to the Armenian Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Coptic Church, the Syrian Jacobite Church, and the Latin Churches. It is apparent that they are not at all happy with these arrangements!
In the center of the edifice is a small structure called the Edicule through which one must literally crawl in order to see the hollowed out rock which is said to be the site of Jesus's tomb and on which Joseph of Arimathea is said to have laid Jesus's body after he was taken down from the cross. Since this so called tomb was only discovered in 335 A.D. when Constantine demolished the Roman temple that occupied this site, the actual site is conjectural and cannot be proven historically or archaeologically. Today it is only symbolically important.
In the 2000 years since Jesus's death the Christian Church has fragmented into innumerable sects and this fact is very evident today at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In contrast, the Dome of the Rock (Islam) and the Wailing Wall (Judaism) stand out as clearly identified and undivided expressions of their faiths.
The article on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the March-April 2001 issue of Archaeology by Elizabeth J. Himelford describes the situation at the Church so vividly that I have appended the author's story to my remarks.